The Train Driver Themes

The Train Driver follows a white Afrikaans man, Roelf Visagie, searching for the corpse of an unnamed Black woman, a journey that leads him to reevaluate his understanding of race. Roelf was driving a train that ran over the Black woman and her baby and has been burdened with guilt ever since the accident. Roelf’s wife resorts to racial stereotypes to comfort him, reassuring Roelf that the woman was probably drunk and high…

Over the course of Roelf’s stay at Simon’s shack, the men gradually start to use words from each other’s languages: Simon starts saying “ja” instead of “ewe,” and Roelf echoes Xhosa phrases used by Simon. The intertwining of their languages highlights the characters’ desire to communicate and connect with each other in spite of the societal factors that divide them. The play also explores language through the power of vulgarities. Roelf swears throughout the play…

The Train Driver takes place in South Africa, which recognizes 11 official languages. Roelf is a native Afrikaans speaker, and Simon’s first language is Xhosa. The two communicate in English, though each man peppers phrases of his own language into the dialogue. Roelf appears to be more fluent in English than Simon is, and he emphasizes more than once that he is “fully bilingual.” However, he does not know Simon’s language, and he often…

The inciting incident of The Train Driver is the suicide of Red Doek, the culmination of a lifetime of despair and hopelessness. Roelf could see the lack of hope in her eyes when she stood on the track, and he later tells Simon his belief that Red Doek’s despair rendered her not only ready for death, but to some extent already dead. By explicitly linking despair to death, the play implicitly links hope to…